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As a relatively long-term user of Substack and Substack's Notes platform, it seems like the better X refugee camp from what's available, at least as far as vibrant public square goes. There has certainly been an uptick in doofuses and bad takes but, in my experience, it's easy to ignore them (Mute) or blast them out of your feed (Block). It serves my needs and I like it in conjunction with The Motte for general information and sense-making.
My knowledge of Bluesky is that's where all the anti-comicsgate (I think that's the side of the lefties/femenists) people ended up after everyone kept bashing their rotten takes, doxing and general whisper-network activity. They are definitely hidden behind a firewall now, but I can't tell if that made them more or less powerful. Whatever they did to Ed Piskor seems to have been coordinated there and it was enough to drive the man to suicide. Anyway, take a look at Heather Antos, Gail Simone, Mark Waid and Alex Di Campi and let me know what you see. If it's not true and these folks are monsters organizing industry hits on people, that would be good information to know.
That's because Substack is an actual improvement, whereas Bluesky is just a straight up re-implementation. And straight re-implementations are big fat losers in the marketplace of platforms; ask any gun Breadtuber, Matrix fan, Mastodon user, or 4chan splinter group about that.
Something big has to happen for other platforms to rise- Pawoo and Gab are the largest Mastodon (Twitter reimplementation) instances simply because they host stuff you couldn't post on Twitter. And the thing about "decentralization" is that it's just another word for "make sure Apple/Google can't ban the clients off of the phones, since that's where 99% of our userbase is browsing from at any given time".
The only exception to that rule is Reddit, where Digg had it all then blew it up with a redesign and other bullshit- but that was also 15 years ago and before the rise of the smartphone and corresponding App Store-beholden lock-in.
Did any of the guntube alternatives survive? I figured if any alt platform had a draw, "watch machine guns shooting and learn how to finish 80% lowers" would be an easy sell. Maybe people are just that lazy.
Aside from perhaps BitchUte and this most recent attempt they have not survived.
The problem is that the restrictions on YouTube still aren't onerous enough to drive channels off it completely. I like the latter because it's an easy Patreon-replacement bundle (and the only two gun channels that aren't "blow up teh watermelon"-tier that post regularly, that being ForgottenWeapons and 9-Hole Reviews, live there; Paul Harrell used to be that way too before he died of what was clearly YouTube comment-related cancer), and there's only so much magdumping MG footage you can watch before it just becomes uninteresting (and 80% guns are also pretty easy to do just by following the instructions).
I think the problem is that the people who are actually doing interesting/envelope-pushing things with guns tend to be off the beaten path and to a large extent would like to keep it that way.
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